Existing approaches to neural machine translation (NMT) generate the target language sequence token-by-token from left to right. However, this kind of unidirectional decoding framework cannot make full use of the target-side future contexts which can be produced in a right-to-left decoding direction, and thus suffers from the issue of unbalanced outputs. In this paper, we introduce a synchronous bidirectional–neural machine translation (SB-NMT) that predicts its outputs using left-to-right and right-to-left decoding simultaneously and interactively, in order to leverage both of the history and future information at the same time. Specifically, we first propose a new algorithm that enables synchronous bidirectional decoding in a single model. Then, we present an interactive decoding model in which left-to-right (right-to-left) generation does not only depend on its previously generated outputs, but also relies on future contexts predicted by right-to-left (left-to-right) decoding. We extensively evaluate the proposed SB-NMT model on large-scale NIST Chinese–English, WMT14 English–German, and WMT18 Russian–English translation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significant improvements over the strong Transformer model by 3.92, 1.49, and 1.04 BLEU points, respectively, and obtains the state-of-the-art performance on Chinese–English and English–German translation tasks.


This paper proposes a context model which separates the upper and lower layer according to characteristic of each class using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We also present a context-aware multi-agent system (CAMAS) architecture which provides the solution of policy problem using the classification of rule and implementation of a rule-based engine. We enhance the response time for offering adaptive services. We solve the policy conflict problem among users by using reasoning and privilege delegation.


A multinational study is reported on the relationship between values and attitudes. Environmental attitudes were measured using the revised New Environmental Paradigm (NEP: Dunlap et al ., 1992) and Thompson and Barton's (1994) ecocentrism-anthropocentrism scales. Other measures included gender, SES, religion, and Schwartz's (1994) universal values scale. Survey data were obtained from college students in 14 countries. A sample of 2160 participants was obtained through university contacts in each country. Results found support for the distinction between different types of environmental attitudes. Regression analyses revealed a consistent pattern of findings across countries. Scores on the NEP scale and the ecocentrism scale were predicted by universalism (positively), power (negatively), and tradition (negatively). In contrast, anthropocentric concerns were significantly related to benevolence (negatively), power (positively), tradition (positively), and security (positively). Overall, these findings support the value-basis theory of environmental attitudes.


This paper presents a CAD system for the automatic synthesis and verification of gate-level timed circuits. Timed circuits are a class of asynchronous circuits which incorporate explicit timing information in the specification which is used throughout the synthesis procedure to optimize the design. This system accepts a textual specification capable of specifying general circuit behavior and timing requirements. This specification is systematically transformed to a graphical representation that can be analyzed using an exact and efficient timing analysis algorithm to find the reachable state space. From this state space, our synthesis procedure derives a timed circuit that is hazard-free using only basic gates to facilitate the mapping to semi-custom components, such as standard-cells and gate-arrays. The resulting gate-level timed circuit implementations are up to 40 percent smaller and 50 percent faster than those produced using other asynchronous design methodologies. We also demonstrate that our timed designs can be smaller and faster than their synchronous counterparts. To address verification, we have applied our timing analysis algorithm to verify efficiently not only our synthesized circuits but also a wide collection of reasonable-sized, highly concurrent timed circuits that could not previously be verified using traditional techniques.


In this paper a distributed system for the development of the Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) control software is shown. This system is composed by three software components running on three different computers linked by a TCP/IP ethernet local area network (LAN). The first software component called human machine interface (HMI) runs on the first PC machine and interfaces the human operator with the onboard UUV computer. The vehicle software control running on the onboard UUV computer interacts with a 3D graphical simulator showing the virtual undersea world and the vehicle motion. The 3D graphical simulator also runs on a PC computer. This tool has been used for the development of the control software of SARA, the Enea's Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). It greatly reduced the time and the money spent in the AUV developing and the risks in future sea tests.


Dimensionality reduction is of high importance in hyperspectral data processing, which can effectively reduce the data redundancy and computation time for improved classification accuracy. Band selection and feature extraction methods are two widely used dimensionality reduction techniques. By integrating the advantages of the band selection and feature extraction, the authors propose a new method for reducing the dimension of hyperspectral image data. First, a new and fast band selection algorithm is proposed for hyperspectral images based on an improved determinantal point process (DPP). To reduce the amount of calculation, the dual-DPP is used for fast sampling representative pixels, followed by k-nearest neighbour-based local processing to explore more spatial information. These representative pixel points are used to construct multiple adjacency matrices to describe the correlation between bands based on mutual information. To further improve the classification accuracy, two-dimensional singular spectrum analysis is used for feature extraction from the selected bands. Experiments show that the proposed method can select a low-redundancy and representative band subset, where both data dimension and computation time can be reduced. Furthermore, it also shows that the proposed dimensionality reduction algorithm outperforms a number of state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy.


High plasma levels of VLDL are associated with increased risk for atherosclerosis. Here we show that VLDL (75 to 150 microg/mL) activates nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB), a transcription factor known to play a key role in regulation of inflammation. Oxidation of VLDL reduced its capacity to activate NF-kappaB in vitro, whereas free fatty acids such as linoleic and oleic acid activated NF-kappaB to the same extent as did VLDL. Intravenous injection of human VLDL (6 mg protein per kg) into rats resulted in arterial activation of NF-kappaB as assessed by electrophoretic mobility shift assay. Aortic endothelial cells showed positive nuclear staining for the activated RelA (p65) subunit of NF-kappaB at 6 to 24 hours after injection. There was also a parallel expression of the adhesion molecules intercellular adhesion molecule-1 and vascular cell adhesion molecule-1, as well as the cytokine tumor necrosis factor-alpha. Pretreatment of the rats with diet containing 1% of the antioxidant probucol for 8 weeks did not inhibit arterial activation of NF-kappaB in response to injection of VLDL. Moreover, injection of triglycerides (10% Intralipid, 5 mL/kg) activated arterial expression of NF-kappaB to the same extent as VLDL. Our results suggest that VLDL may promote the development of atherosclerotic lesions by activation of the proinflammatory transcription factor NF-kappaB. The effect appears to be mediated by a release of VLDL fatty acids but not to involve VLDL oxidation.


Investigation in the public basement car parks from six Governorates of Kuwait showed the influence of radon concentrations and the probable discomfort caused while parking their cars. Radon concentrations in the public semi-closed car parks distributed in the six Governorate sites were analyzed using Rad7 (Durridge, USA).The peak concentration of radon from the six Kuwait Governorate car parks was relatively higher during the winter season (63.15Bq/m 3 ) than during the summer season (41.73Bq/m 3 ).This validated the influence of relative humidity and temperature, the components of discomfort index (DI). The mean annual absorbed dose rate radon (DRn) and annual effective dose (HE) was observed high when the assessment included the car parks and the surrounding residential apartment and office premises. The DRn (0.02mSv/y) and HE 0.06mSv/y) of radon in the car parks alone indicated radon concentrations below the permissible limits. Statistical assessment indicated the significant differences between the dependence of indoor radon concentrations on the timeseries, temporal and spatial distribution in the six Kuwait Governorate car parks. Hence, the need to ameliorate the radon concentrations in the indoor environment becomes indispensable in the near future. Keywords— Car parks, Radon, Thermal-Humidity


Agency theory argues that pay-performance sensitivity to agents should be negatively associated with risk; however, some empirical evidence suggests the opposite. While analytical studies do not reach consensus on the relation between competition and pay-performance sensitivity, empirical evidence shows a positive relationship. This study uses a proprietary database of a major auto dealership in Taiwan to provide empirical evidence on how risk and competition affect sensitivity of employee pay to performance and how their congruence shapes firm performance. Our results support the prediction of agency theory that salespersons' pay-performance sensitivity is negatively associated with risk (i.e., volatility of sales volume). Importantly, branches perform better when managers follow agency theory to adjust salespersons' pay sensitivity to risk. Additionally, our results show that salespersons' pay-performance sensitivity increases as competition intensifies; however, such relation does not produce higher firm performance.


In this paper I trace the emergence, development, and demise of a hitherto largely ignored but peculiarly French architectural type, the domed entry pavilion. The essential features of the Porte Dauphine at Fontainebleau are traced to the elder du Cerceau's projects for portals at Verneuil I and Charleval combined with suggestions drawn from temporary structures erected for royal entries, particularly that of Henry IV into Rouen. I then propose that the formal logic of the Porte Dauphine compels one to interpret it as an architectural proclamation of Henry's emerging claim to royal absolutism, an assertion backed contextually by a close scrutiny of the sociopolitical situation at the time of its inception and erection. This new monarchic image of power finds its aesthetic maturity in the better-known domed entry pavilion of the Luxembourg Palace. This pavilion in turn is a fusion of the Porte Dauphine with alternative formal possibilities found at Verneuil II and Montceaux, the latter already an important seat of the Luxembourg's patron and Henry's consort, Marie de'Medici. In a possible challenge-and-response series, the duchess of Longueville's château of Coulommiers, its domed entry based on the Valois mausoleum, had immediately preceded the Luxembourg. Coulommiers in turn proved a foil for the immense country seat of Richelieu, itself a foil for the project for Blois promoted by Marie's younger son. Thirty years later the architect of Blois, Francois Mansart, sought to revive the motif of the domed entry with all of its layers of significance in his masterful designs for the east facade of the Louvre. Formally and politically such a revival was not possible in the age of Louis XIV.


Abstract
A sample of Toronto family practitioners was surveyed in order to ascertain whether increased dietary calcium was recommended in the treatment of essential hypertension. It was found that in excess of four-fifths of the same make no dietary calcium recommendations. It was concluded that this was the result of one or more of the following: 1. the low priority granted to nutrition in medical schools and continuing education courses contributes to a lack of awareness of nutritional therapies; 2. the relatively small body of literature pertaining to calcium and hypertension in contrast to the large volume of publications concerning drug therapies may contribute to a lack of familiarity with the research into calcium and hypertension; 3. the fact that the data to date have not established a definite causal relationship between low dietary calcium and hypertension may contribute to a lack of conviction as to the efficacy of increased dietary calcium as a treatment.


This issue brief provides an introduction to the BarzA³n movement, including an overview of the factors that prompted its formation and an examination of how the movement went about organizing discontented farmers, businessmen, and urban consumers. It argues that the economic crisis following the 1994 currency crash disrupted economic activity such that people in very different situations came to have common complaints. It further contends that the BarzA³n movement in particular was able to recruit tens of thousands of members and capture public sympathy because of innovative organizing strategies and a rhetoric that invoked broadly accepted concepts of national salvation, personal pride, and social justice.


he states that I have attempted " to divorce it (the thalamic dysfunction syndrome) . . . from environmental factors "; whereas in my paper I stated clearly that " the thalamic dysfunction state may be regarded as a response of the organism to stresses of various kinds " (i.e., environmental stress, conflicts, toxins, and so on). With regard to his remarks about the morphine and cocaine addiction syndromes, if Dr. Kirman were to go to the trouble of consulting any of the standard psychiatric textbooks dealing with the subject, he would find it stated that alkaloid addiction differs in a number of important respects from alcoholism. This last-named toxin, incidentally, is a cortical depressant rather than a true euphoriant of the type described in my article, in addition to being chemically and pharmacologically unrelated to the agents under consideration. Finally, while admitting "the limited value of present methods" (i.e., of psychiatric treatment), he is apparently unable to suggest any alternative or more effective form of treatment than that suggested in my article. In other words, his criticism is the purely destructive kind which questions everything but decides nothing, containing not one single constructive contribution to the problem under discussion. I should, of course, welcome any constructive suggestions or comments on the new concept of affective disorders put forward in my paper and the pharmacotherapy of these conditions. But it is a pity that Dr. Kirman did not take the trouble to read the paper through properly before erupting so impulsively into print.-I am, etc.,


Using rich longitudinal register data from Denmark, we show that the allocation of mothers between the competitive private sector and the family-friendly public sector significantly changes around the birth of their first child. Specifically, mothers – post first childbirth – are increasingly switching from the private to the public sector and are also less likely to leave the public sector. The incidence of switching sectors can be partly explained by occupational characteristics, such as the convexity of pay and time pressure. In line with the compensating wage differential theory, we observe that the switch into the public sector is accompanied with a wage drop.


To estimate a diagnostic probability similarly to experts using answers to interviews, we developed a system that fundamentally behaves as a Bayesian model. For predefined interviews, we defined the sensitivity and specificity related to one or more diagnoses. Additionally, we used a predefined parent-child relation between diagnoses to decrease the number of parameters to set. After calculating the disease probability, we trained the model using the difference of post-test probability between computer calculations and three experts' opinions. We evaluated the effects of setting up tree structures. When using a tree structure, the model trained faster and produced better fitting results than the model without tree structure. Training with multiple raters' training data confused the model. The scores worsened in later epochs. Herein, we present the new method's benefits and characteristics.


Random number generators (RNGs) are computational or physical functions generating a sequence of bits or symbols (e.g. groups of bits - numbers) that do not feature any pattern - generated bits or symbols (numbers) are independent and uniformly distributed. Random number generators have many applications in modern technologies. They are widely used in cryptography, but also in Monte Carlo simulations of complex systems, as noise generators in telecommunication systems, in games, slot machines, etc.
Many methods of generating random numbers exist, starting from ancient methods using dice and coin flipping, sophisticated methods using quantum mechanics, up to modern principles that can be implemented in electronic systems and in particular in logic devices.
Random numbers are crucial in cryptography: they are used as confidential keys, padding data, initialization vectors, nonces in challenge-response protocols, but also as random masks in side channel attack countermeasures. Since the era of Kerckhoff, the confidentiality of data is based on encryption keys: it is supposed that cryptographic algorithm is known to the adversary and that confidentiality is guaranteed only by a confidential key unknown to him.
It is interesting to note that one of the simplest and the most secure encryption techniques called one time pad is entirely based on a direct use of random numbers. It can be proved that the one time pad cannot be broken if used correctly, i.e. if each of the generated random sequences is used only once. However, this information-theoretic guarantee only holds if these sequences come from a high quality random source with high entropy.
Compared to other application areas, except for good statistical quality and knowledge of the distribution of generated random numbers, cryptography applications have strong security requirements - random number generators must be cryptographically secure. Cryptographically secure random number generators must generate random numbers that have good statistical quality and the generated sequences must not be predictable and manipulable.
In cryptographic applications, for security reasons, cryptographic keys and other security critical data must be generated inside cryptographic modules and in particular inside semiconductor devices if the cryptographic module is implemented as a cryptographic system on a chip (e.g. in smartcards). For this reason, we will deal only with generators that can be implemented inside digital devices.


A wide variety of care services for older people are offered in Germany. However, these services are characterised by a strong disintegration. The lack of efficient coordination and cooperation structures between different service providers makes it more difficult to organise comprehensive support and relief for family carers. This report provides an overview of the current situation and needs of family carers, the socio-political frame of family caring, the coverage and usage of social and health related care services as well as trends and perspectives regarding future provision of services.


Barrier paper, which is made of bleached absorbent kraft pulp, is a significant layer of decorative laminates, since it controls the see-through of brown color of saturating kraft paper and its opacifying effect usually is achieved by a heavy loading of TiO2. The TiO2, due to its very small particle size, passes between the cellulosic fibers and drains into the white water. To overcome this problem, papermakers try to use various retention aids for improving overall retention of TiO2, but agglomeration of TiO2 causes a decrease in light scattering efficiency of TiO2. During the subsequent saturation operation, the air in the voids is replaced by melamine formaldehyde, which has a refractive index close to that of cellulose. As a result, the sheet becomes translucent and poses 'see through' problem. Keeping this in view, anhydrous magnesium silicate is used as an extender with TiO2 because it effectively increases the overall filler retention, sheet brightness, opacity. The dispersed aqueous slurry of anhydrous magnesium silicate forms fine gel that entraps TiO2 in the wet web and prevents removal of fines and fillers. The addition of 25% TiO2, 7% micronized soapstone powder, 8% anhydrous magnesium silicate, 1% melamine formaldehyde, and 0.1% sodium hexameta-phosphate was found to improve the overall retention by 65.25% and to cut the manufacturing cost by US$ 546.00 per tonne of pulp without affecting the product quality.


Tumors and pseudotumors of the liver account for fewer than 2% of the tumors in children and vary considerably in incidence throughout the pediatric age range, with hepatoblastoma, infantile hemangioendothelioma, and mesenchymal hamartoma seen most frequently in the first 2 years of life and hepatocellular carcinoma, focal nodular hyperplasia, and undifferentiated "embryonal" sarcoma noted in older children. Despite the variety of malignant tumors seen in children and the number of patterns in individual tumors (eg, hepatoblastoma), the most important criterion for long-term prognosis is the stage of the tumor at the time of first resection. Accurate staging by the surgeon and pathologist is therefore the primary objective in examination of malignant hepatic tumors.


Sexual selection and reproductive strategies affect individual fitness and population genetic diversity. Long-standing paradigms in sexual selection and mating system theory have been overturned with the recent integration of behavioural and genetic techniques. Much of this theory is based on avian systems, where a distinction has now been made between social and genetic partners. Reptiles provide contrast to well-understood avian systems because they are ectothermic, and phylogenetic comparisons are not hindered by complicated patterns of parental care. I investigate the implications of the mating system and reproductive ecology on individual fitness and population genetic diversity of tuatara, the sole extant representative of the archaic reptilian order Sphenodontia. Long-term data on individual size of Stephens Island tuatara revealed a density-dependent decline in body condition driven by an apparently high population growth rate resulting from past habitat modification. Spatial, behavioural, and genetic data from Stephens Island tuatara were analysed to assess territory structure, the mating system, and variation in male fitness. Large male body size was the primary predictor of 1) physical access to females, 2) competitive ability, and 3) mating and paternity success. Seasonal monogamy predominates, with probable long-term polygyny and polyandry. Annually, male reproduction is highly skewed in the wild and in captivity. Over 80% of offspring from a captive population on Little Barrier Island were sired by one male and multiple paternity was found in approximately 18% of these clutches, although it was not detected in any wild clutch. The dominance structure has lead to reduced genetic variation in the recovering Little Barrier Island population. Stephens Island tuatara show fine-scale population genetic structuring that appears to be driven by past habitat modification and a sedentary lifestyle in the absence of sex-biased dispersal or migration. These results will improve conservation management of tuatara by providing guidelines for maximising genetic diversity of small and captive populations and will aid in selecting founders for translocated populations. Because of the archaic phylogenetic position of tuatara, this study provides a baseline for comparisons of mating system evolution in reptiles.


The nuclear energy industry produces radioactive waste at various stages of the fuel cycle. In the United Kingdom, spent fuel is reprocessed at the Sellafield facility (formerly known as Windscale), in Cumbria on the north-west coast of England. Waste generated at the site comprises a wide range of radionuclides, including radiocarbon (14C) which, due to its long half-life (5730 years), environmental mobility and high bio-availability, is the largest contributor to collective dose commitment from the entire nuclear industry. 14C is disposed of in various forms, one of which is as highly soluble inorganic carbon within the low-level liquid radioactive effluent, via pipelines, into the Irish Sea. The discharged 14C is then rapidly incorporated into the dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) pool.

This project aimed to better understand the fate of Sellafield discharges of 14C to the marine environment. Investigations of intertidal sites in the Irish Sea and West of Scotland found 14C enrichment above ambient background levels in shell material, including at the most northerly site, located 265 km north of Sellafield. Dissolved inorganic 14C is readily utilised during shell formation by calcifying organisms and mussel shell 14C activities at sites closer to Sellafield appear to be varying in response to the total Sellafield 14C discharge activity over the preceding 5 years. Due to subsequent erosion of this material, 14C is transferred to finer fractions of intertidal sediments where it is accumulating.

During photosynthesis, primary producing organisms also utilise carbon derived from the DIC pool. This uptake and the trophic-level transfer of 14C within the Irish Sea and West of Scotland marine environments were examined. The 14C activities of Irish Sea DIC and biota in the east and west basins were enriched and highly variable. A general decrease in 14C activity with distance from Sellafield was observed, although, enriched activities were also found in the West of Scotland where the activities were more homogenous. Organic sediments were significantly less enhanced than associated benthic organisms. This could be due to rapid scavenging of labile, 14C-enriched organic material by organisms and mixing to depth with older, 14C depleted material. Commercially important species were 14C enriched; however, the radiation dose from their consumption is extremely low and radiologically insignificant.

To evaluate the transfer of 14C to top predators in the UK marine environment, 14C activities were examined in stranded marine mammals. All Irish Sea samples were enriched, as were most from the West of Scotland, although the 14C activities were lower. In demonstrating transfer of enriched 14C to apex predators for the first time, this study also showed that marine mammal activities correlated significantly with distance from Sellafield and Sellafield 14C discharge activities for 24 months prior to stranding. These measurements also provided some insight into harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) ecology, indicating high foraging fidelity and suggesting the animals stranded on the West of Scotland did not forage in the Irish Sea.

The studies in this thesis examined the dispersion of Sellafield-derived 14C to both near- and far-field sites and the subsequent ecosystem uptake and trophic transfer at these locations. However, it is important to attempt to understand the fate of 14C discharges beyond the limitations and scope of analytical investigations. To do so, the first spatial-temporal ecosystem model to predict the ecological fate of Sellafield-derived 14C was developed. The observed trends in 14C activities between different species were predicted by the model which illustrated the integration of 14C in species at higher trophic levels through time.


Magnetization measurements on a single crystal of the high-Tc cuprate HgBa2CuO4 (Hg-1201) are performed for the two field orientations B||c and B||(a,b). Besides zero-field-cooling (zfc) – field-cooling (fc) and magnetization studies, the flux creep relaxation is determined. The zfc curves exhibit pronounced step-like anomalies in the mixed state above the lower critical field Bc1. They are interpreted as those points in the phase diagram where the penetrating flux fronts meet at the center of the sample. In order to obtain more information about the flux pinning mechanism flux creep relaxation experiments are performed at different temperatures in magnetic fields of 0.15 and 2 T. The resulting supercurrent dependence on the mean activation energy is analysed according to the collective pinning theory which predicts U ∝ ((j/jc)−μ −1). The μ-values for B||c are 0.5 at higher temperatures and 2 at 5 K, and they vary between 1.1 and 1.5 for B||(a,b). The observed behaviour is quite different from that found for powder samples.


One of the crucial parts of any corpus-based machine translation system is a large-scale bilingual corpus that is aligned at various levels such, as the sentence and phrase levels. This kind of corpus, however, is not easy to obtain, and accordingly, there is a great need for an efficient construction method. We approach this problem by integrating two large monolingual corpora in two different languages sharing the same source of information. We often see such a situation in journalistic texts where the same events are reported in many languages. Unfortunately, they often lack article-level alignment information and the recovery of this is the first problem to solve. In this paper, we report a method of automatically aligning Japanese and English newspaper articles in the financial and economic news domain. Although conventional methods require some manual work, the proposed method works fully automatically. We show that our method can align such newspaper articles with an accuracy of 97%.


. Actin capping protein (CP) binds barbed ends of actin filaments to regulate actin assembly. CP is an (cid:97) / (cid:98) heterodimer. Vertebrates have conserved isoforms of each subunit. Muscle cells contain two (cid:98) isoforms. (cid:98) 1 is at the Z-line; (cid:98) 2 is at the intercalated disc and cell periphery in general. To investigate the functions of the isoforms, we replaced one isoform with another using expression in hearts of transgenic mice. Mice expressing (cid:98) 2 had a severe phenotype with juvenile lethality. Myofibril architecture was severely dis-rupted. The (cid:98) 2 did not localize to the Z-line. Therefore, (cid:98) 1 has a distinct function that includes interactions at the Z-line. Mice expressing (cid:98) 1 showed altered morphology of the intercalated disc, without the lethality or myofibril disruption of the (cid:98) 2-expressing mice. The in vivo function of CP is presumed to involve binding barbed ends of actin filaments. To test this hypothesis, we expressed a (cid:98) 1 mutant that poorly binds actin. These mice showed both myofibril disruption and intercalated disc remodeling, as predicted. Therefore, CP (cid:98) 1 and CP (cid:98) 2 each have a distinct function that cannot be provided by the other isoform. CP (cid:98) 1 attaches actin filaments to the Z-line, and CP (cid:98) 2 organizes the actin at the intercalated discs. of one-cell embryos, which were then surgically reimplanted into pseudopregnant female mice. DNA was purified from the tail clips of progeny by digestion at 55 (cid:56) C overnight with 50 mM Tris-HCL, pH 8.0, 100 mM EDTA, 0.5% SDS, and 500 (cid:109) g/ml proteinase K (Boehringer Mannheim Corp.). DNA was purified using Phase Lock Gel I (Heavy; 5 Prime-3 Prime) and resuspended in 100 (cid:109) l of 10 mM Tris, pH 8.0, 1 mM EDTA. Progeny were screened for the presence of the transgene by genomic Southern blot analysis using a 32 P-labeled 1.2 kb SalI–EcoRI fragment of the (cid:97) -MyHC promoter. Three different founder lines were identified for (cid:97) -MyHC-wt (cid:98) 1, three for (cid:97) -MyHC-wt (cid:98) 2, and four for (cid:97) -MyHC- (cid:98) 1L262R. Founders were bred against a C57BL/6 background and studied as N1 heterozygotes. Founder lines with the greatest expres- sion and most severe phenotypes are described in this paper. Transgene copy number was quantitated for the progeny of the three founder lines for (cid:97) -MyHC-wt (cid:98) 1 by PhosphoImager analysis of genomic Southern blots. The transgene copy numbers for lines 1, 2, and 3 were 2, 4, and 7, respectively. Genomic DNA digested with EcoRI and SalI were probed with a 32 P-labeled 1.2-kb SalI–EcoRI fragment of the (cid:97) -MyHC The transgene generated a 1.7-kb band, and the endogenous (cid:97) -MyHC gene a 2.5-kb band. The intensities of radioactiv- ity associated each band were the endogenous


The chemical composition and immunochemical characterization of the four cross-reactive pneumococcal capsular polysaccharides within group 9 (types 9N, 9A, 9L, and 9V) were investigated. Their serological reactions were studied by using unabsorbed antisera prepared by immunizing rabbits with pneumococci of each of the four group 9 capsular polysaccharide types. Type 9A antiserum showed the most extensive cross-reactions with the four group 9 polysaccharides. Absorption with type 9N, 9L, or 9V polysaccharide removed 63, 96, or 87%, respectively, of the heterologous antibodies from the type 9A antiserum. All four of the group 9 polysaccharides contained glucose, N-acetylmannosamine, and glucuronic acid. In addition, types 9N and 9L had N-acetylglucosamine, and types 9A, 9L, and 9V contained galactose. Reduction of the uronic acid residues of the type 9 polysaccharides removed most of their homologous and much of their heterologous reactivities, indicating an important role for the uronic acid component in their antigenicity. The four group 9 polysaccharide preparations had comparable molecular sizes and only traces of protein and nucleic acid. Further studies to evaluate the most protective type among the group 9 strains to be included in the current pneumococcal vaccine are discussed.


Bulk organic parameters and stable and radiocarbon isotope compositions of organic carbon (δ13COC and
Δ14COC) as well as various biomarkers (lignin phenols, plant waxes etc.) have been used to investigate the
biogeochemical characteristics of organic carbon in the Amazon River system. However, the source,
concentration and distribution pattern of lignin on the Amazon shelf and fan has not been assessed so far. In
particular, the compound-specific stable carbon isotope compositions (δ13C) of lignin phenols have not been
characterized in the Amazon River system. In order to study the distribution of lignin in the lower Amazon basin and its dispersal on the shelf and fan, we used riverbed sediments from the Amazon mainstream and its main tributaries and marine surface sediments on the Amazon shelf and fan. The samples were analyzed for particulate organic carbon content (POC), δ13COC, lignin phenol compositions and compound-specific δ13C of individual lignin phenols. The concentrations of aluminium and silicon (Al/Si) were used as a proxy for grain size[1]. The POC content in the main tributaries ranged from 0.13 to 3.99 wt-% and increased with Al/Si ratio in each tributary. δ13COC varied from -26.1‰ to -29.9‰ VPDB in riverbed sediments. Lignin content (represented by Λ8, sum of eight lignin phenols in OC, expressed as mg/100mg OC) ranged from 0.73 to 6.91 and is positively related with Al/Si ratio in the main tributaries except for the Xingu River, in which Λ8 decreased with Al/Si. Ratios of syringyl to vanillyl (S/V) and cinnamyl to vanillyl (C/V) varied from 0.70 to 1.51 and 0.08 to 0.47, respectively, suggesting that the dominant source of lignin is non-woody angiosperm tissue. The ratios of vanillic acid to vanillin (Ad/Al)v (0.26-0.71) and syringic acid to syringaldehyde (Ad/Al)s (0.15-0.57) indicated relatively fresh, non-degraded lignin. In marine sediments, the δ13COC ranged from -18.6‰ to -26.7‰ and is correlated with the Λ8 value (0.04-2.01). The decreasing Λ8 value along the coast from the Amazon River mouth towards the northwest implies that lignin is distributed by the North Brazil Current. A main plant source of non-woody angiosperm tissue was indicated by the S/V (0.59-1.62) and C/V (0.10-0.43) ratios on the marine samples. The agreement between riverbed and marine sediments suggests that processing of POC during transport from the basin to offshore does not change the plant source information of lignin. Highly degraded lignin on the Amazon fan and the southeast shelf is indicated by (Ad/Al)v (0.49-0.99). δ13C of lignin phenols of 9 marine sediments ranged from -28.6‰ to -33.3‰ and were consistently lower than δ13COC (-19.7‰ to -26.7‰). Depleted δ13C of lignin phenols indicate that the POC produced by the terrestrial biosphere is mainly derived from higher plants using C3 photosynthesis.
References
Bouchez, J., Galy, V., Hilton, R.G., Gaillardet, J., Moreira-Turcq, P., Perez, M.A., France-Lanord, C., Maurice, L., 2014. Source, transport and fluxes of Amazon River particulate organic carbon: Insights from river sediment depth-profiles. Geochemica et Cosmochimica Acta 133, 280-298


Venture capital investors are specialized financial intermediaries that provides funding for technological innovation with the goal of realizing a capital gain within a few years. We are the first to examine the association of venture capital funding with a company's choice of innovation strategies. We employ a unique dataset of over 10,000 innovative Dutch companies, some of which received venture financing. The data include detailed information on patent applications, innovation activities, and other company characteristics. We find that companies backed by venture capital focus on the build-up of absorptive capacity by engaging in both in-house R&D and in the acquisition of external knowledge. Companies that receive public funding, instead, are able to relax their financing constraints and perform more innovation activities without focusing solely on absorptive capacity. Our results also suggest that the correlation between venture capital funding and the build-up of absorptive capacity is not only due to a selection effect. We derive implications of these findings for corporate strategy and public policy.


Abstract In this study, the frog embryo teratogenesis assay (FETAX – Xenopus) technique was employed to evaluate the potential teratogenicity of the selective ß-adrenoceptor (AR) agonist, CL 316.243. In this context, CL 316.243 was applied to the South African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) embryos. The media containing the CL 316.24-exposed embryos were monitored and changed/replaced once every 24 hours. Using FETAX, we determined the minimum concentrations to inhibit growth (MCIG) for CL 316.243. The 96-hour no observable adverse effect concentration (NOAEC), the 96-hour lowest observable adverse effect concentration (LOAEC), the 96-hour EC50 (malformation) and the 96-hour LC50 (lethal concentration) for mortality and malformation could not be determined because the used concentrations did not affect viability or the presence of abnormalities. On the other hand, the MCIG of CL 316.243 was determined as 1 mg/L. Our results demonstrated that CL 316.243 administration was associated with no of teratogenic and toxic effects. However, from first concentration we used (1 to 5 mg/L) length of embryos reduced significantly (p < 0.001) when compared to control of Xenopus embryos. Further studies should be conducted with different concentrations in order to investigate the optimal concentrations for treating preterm labor with these substances.


Device-free passive (DFP) localization techniques have received increasing attention for location-based services due to their ability to realize localization without holding any wireless device. Most of the existing DFP localization systems are based on the measurement of received signal strength (RSS) only. However, the localization accuracy is easily affected by the spatial and temporal variance of RSS due to multipath fading and noise, even in a static environment. In this paper, we propose a novel localization system for DFP localization using an array sensor, which uses an antenna array at a receiver and is mainly based on the signal eigenvector. We use a fingerprinting technique with multiclass support vector machines (SVMs) based on a combination of array signal features with spatial and temporal averaging. We evaluate the localization performance of our proposed system in different propagation environments, i.e., line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS). In addition, we analyze two types of receive antenna placement, i.e., centralized and distributed antennas. The experimental results show that the localization accuracy can be improved by the proposed system, particularly in the centralized antenna case. Moreover, they show that the proposed system can improve localization accuracy compared with the conventional RSS-only-based system.


A compact, fully-printed negative-refractive-index transmission-line (NRI-TL) metamaterial-loaded dipole antenna is proposed, which exhibits multiband resonant characteristics that are not harmonically related. The multiband behavior is achieved by loading a host dipole antenna with series capacitive gaps and shunt inductive strips, to form a two unit-cell NRI-TL loaded antenna. By modeling the right-handed dipole sections as biconical transmission lines, the rich dispersion properties of the NRI-TL structure can be exploited, while still creating an effective radiator. An equivalent circuit model of the NRI-TL antenna is developed, and it is shown that its performance agrees well with the results obtained using full-wave simulations. It is also shown that the resonant behavior of the antenna can be adjusted by changing its geometrical parameters, which in turn tune the loading parameters of each NRI-TL unit cell. As such, both dual-band and triband versions of the antenna are designed and fabricated. The dual-band version exhibits three distinct resonances at 1.15, 2.88, and 3.72 GHz, with measured -10 dB bandwidths of 37 and 1150 MHz. The lowest resonance at 1.15 GHz corresponds to a 47% reduction in the resonant frequency compared to that of a reference unloaded dipole antenna, which translates into a size miniaturization factor of approximately two. The antenna exhibits stable dipolar radiation patterns with a linear electric field polarization, and has a total size of 50 × 10 × 0.79 mm3 or 0.19λ0 × 0.04λ0 × 0.003λ0 at 1.15 GHz. Throughout the operating bands the measured gain and radiation efficiency vary from 0.11 to 3.26 dBi and 49.5% to 95.6%, respectively.


This brief addresses the control problem of a structurally flexible positioning system by utilizing transducers made of Lead (Pb) Zirconate Titanate (PZT), commonly referred to as piezoelectric transducers, to act as actuator and sensor elements. The system possesses nonlinear dynamics and undesirable characteristics such as friction. The placement of PZT actuators on the flexible structure is studied and a nonlinear tracking control scheme augmented with a friction compensation term is developed. Experimental results are presented which illustrate the effectiveness of the control algorithm and improved performance of the controller as compared to the case where no secondary actuation is used.


Recent studies indicate that the potency and agonist or antagonist activity of steroid hormone ligands are dependent, in part, on ligand–receptor binding affinity as well as the conformation of the ligand–receptor complex. The binding of ligands to hormone receptors is thought to involve interactions by which shapes of both the receptor and ligand are modified in the formation of the ligand–receptor complex. As a consequence, it is essential to explore the significance of ligand flexibility in the development of screening‐level structure–activity relationships. In this review, examples are provided of techniques used to generate and screen ligand conformers in the development of quantitative structure–activity relationships and active analogue search algorithms. The biological endpoint modeled was binding affinity of natural ligands and xenobiotics to the aryl hydrocarbon, estrogen, and androgen receptors. These approaches may be useful in future studies to evaluate relationships between ligand structure, receptor binding affinity, and, ultimately, transactivational events associated with receptor interactions with DNA response elements and associated proteins. An improved understanding of ligand–receptor interactions in the context of well‐defined effector systems will enhance the development of credible predictive models that can be used to screen large sets of chemicals for potential agonist or antagonistic activity.


Background Unfavorable biomechanical situations, usually related to the performance of a profession and competitive sports practice, promote formation of overloads. This problem may be particularly perceptible among sportsmen that practice strength and stamina sports. The present study deals with rowing. Objective The purpose of this study is to evaluate the degree of changes of elasticity in the vertebral bodies of the lumbosacral spine in competitive rowers. Design The lesions of the intervertebral discs of the lumbosacral spine and the modification of bone structure aiming towards higher density, which were discovered in the tested rowers, resulted in the undertaking of further research in the area of contingent changes in their elasticity. Setting This research used a previously created original method, which due to the existence of relation between the structure of the bone tissue and its mechanical properties as well as radio-density, uses the possibilities of a computer tomograph. Participants The research was conducted over 20 athletes from the national team aged 21 to 33, practicing competitive rowing with symmetrical sculling oars. Main outcome measurements Overload lesions in the athletes (rowers) have a direct relation to the formation of morphological changes (degenerative changes) in the area of tissue structures of the lumbar spine;. Results Within the group of the tested rowers, in the cancellous part of the vertebral bodies of the lumbar spine (especially in vertebrae L3 to L5), an increase in the longitudinal elasticity modulus occurs, which aims towards values corresponding to those of a compact bone. Conclusions Biomechanical analysis of spine loads and new techniques and methods for the testing of the condition of spine tissue structure let us prove that competitive rowing practice, in its present form, leads to permanent overload lesions of the lumbar spine.


We consider the problem of performing Bayesian inference in probabilistic models where observations are accompanied by uncertainty, referred to as"uncertain evidence."We explore how to interpret uncertain evidence, and by extension the importance of proper interpretation as it pertains to inference about latent variables. We consider a recently-proposed method"distributional evidence"as well as revisit two older methods: Jeffrey's rule and virtual evidence. We devise guidelines on how to account for uncertain evidence and we provide new insights, particularly regarding consistency. To showcase the impact of different interpretations of the same uncertain evidence, we carry out experiments in which one interpretation is defined as"correct."We then compare inference results from each different interpretation illustrating the importance of careful consideration of uncertain evidence.


Emergence has many meanings, some of them trivial or of limited interest. There is the example of dynamical emergence as the time evolution of a dynamical system; structural emergence such as the construction of a selfsupporting arch from pieces of stone, or the emergence of oscillation from a capacitor and the coil, which alone don't oscillate. Perhaps the most interesting case of emergence is in open-ended biological evolution where new potentials arise together with the new structures that use them. How is this possible? Current interest in "niche construction" and ALife modeling puts an emphasis on the relational, or interactional properties of organisms. A relational property (like fragility or similarity) requires more than one agent to define. In a number of recent works we have studied the role of relational properties in the emergence of new evolutionary forces and the consecutive emergence of species and ecosystems. To understand social agents, we may generalize from emergent evolution. Similar to the relational phenotype in an evolutionary system, the agent in a social system finds itself in a changing dynamic environment which acts back to the very properties of the individual in a relational or "permeable" way. Individuals are "not always what they are": they change, sometimes fundamentally, with the changing history of their contexts.


Heroic operations are routinely offered in industrialised countries for children with severe congenital heart lesions. Parents need to know the outcome to make informed decisions about surgery. A systematic review of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) found 20 studies involving 3808 children and young adult patients with surgical congenital heart disease and 2951 parental reports. Cardiac defects were grouped into simple, moderate and complex. HRQOL was worse compared to healthy controls in all domains, with the largest differences in physical functioning and psychosocial functioning. Cardiac-related HRQOL post-surgery was significantly worse in complex compared with simple congenital heart disease, particularly in terms of symptoms and cognitive function. Parents were most concerned about their children's psychosocial and emotional functioning, communication and cardiac symptoms, while patients' concerns were with physical and social functioning. The systematic review did not look at family dysfunction, including marital breakdown. All the studies were in high-income countries. This study provides valuable information for families and their medical practitioners to consider prior to surgery.


Width-based search methods have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of testbeds, from classical planning problems to image-based simulators such as Atari games. These methods scale independently of the size of the state-space, but exponentially in the problem width. In practice, running the algorithm with a width larger than 1 is computationally intractable, prohibiting IW from solving higher width problems. In this paper, we present a hierarchical algorithm that plans at two levels of abstraction. A high-level planner uses abstract features that are incrementally discovered from low-level pruning decisions. We illustrate this algorithm in classical planning PDDL domains as well as in pixel-based simulator domains. In classical planning, we show how IW(1) at two levels of abstraction can solve problems of width 2. For pixel-based domains, we show how in combination with a learned policy and a learned value function, the proposed hierarchical IW can outperform current flat IW-based planners in Atari games with sparse rewards.


Interruptions of knowledge workers are common and can cause a high cost if they happen at inopportune moments. With recent advances in psycho-physiological sensors and their link to cognitive and emotional states, we are interested whether such sensors might be used to measure interruptibility of a knowledge worker. In a lab and a field study with a total of twenty software developers, we examined the use of psycho-physiological sensors in a real-world context. The results show that a Naive Bayes classifier based on psycho-physiological features can be used to automatically assess states of a knowledge worker's interruptibility with high accuracy in the lab as well as in the field. Our results demonstrate the potential of these sensors to avoid expensive interruptions in a real-world context. Based on brief interviews, we further discuss the usage of such an interruptibility measure and interruption support for software developers.


BACKGROUND
Pain is a frequent complaint from patients undergoing rehabilitation. It can be a major problem and can lead to several activity limitations and participation restrictions. For this reason, when the Professional Practice Committee (PPC) of the Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine (PRM) Section of the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS) decided to prepare evidence-based practice position papers (EBPPs) on the most relevant fields of PRM, a paper on the role of the PRM specialist on pain conditions was also included. The goals of this paper are to provide recommendations on the PRM physician's role in pain management; how to address this major problem and what is the best evidence-based approach for the PRM physician in acute and chronic pain conditions. This paper follows the methodology defined by the Professional Practice Committee of the UEMS-PRM Section.

METHODS
A systematic literature search in PubMed was carried out and the results obtained from filtered papers were subjected to four Delphi rounds.

RESULTS
Fifteen recommendations were obtained from the Consensus Process and systematic review and were approved by all of the delegates of the UEMS-PRM Section. It is recommended that PRM physicians focus on pain as a primary aim of their interventions, in whatever field they are applying their competencies. It is also recommended that the approach to pain focuses either on reducing the symptoms and improving functioning/reducing disability or recurrences and improving the health condition in the long term avoiding chronicity.

CONCLUSIONS
Every PRM specialist encounters the problem of pain and some specialize in this field and their role is greater than that of the regular PRM doctor. Based on the evidence available, it is reasonable to determine the role of the physiatrist in managing pain.


Personality traits are consistently correlated with various indices of acute psychological stress response, including negative emotions and performance impairment. However, resilience is a complex personal characteristic with multiple neural and psychological roots. This article advocates a multifactorial approach to understanding resilience that recognizes the complexity of the topic both empirically and theoretically. The Trait-Stressor-Outcome (TSO) framework for organizing empirical data recognizes the multiplicity of traits, stressors and outcome metrics that may moderate stress response. Research requires a fine-grained data collection approach that discriminates multiple stress factors. Also, multiple layers of theory are necessary to explain individual differences in stress response, including biases in neural functioning, attentional processing, as well as styles of coping and emotion-regulation. Cognitive science differentiates multiple levels of explanation and allows for the integration of mechanisms at multiple levels of abstraction from the neural substrate. We illustrate the application of the multifactorial approach to collecting interpreting data on operator stress resulting from interaction with technology.


Motionless mixers are used as internals to improve the behavior of tubular reactors (diam. 40 mm) for homogeneous liq. phase reactions at low Reynolds no. (Re = 0.005-100). Small gradients in temp. or d. normally lead to large stochastic backmixing of the fluid. Such flow perturbations can effectively be suppressed in addn. to a flattening of the flow profile if regularly assembled internals are used. The motionless mixers used are SMX and SMV, CH, the ratios of the effective fluid velocity to the axial dispersion coeff. are .apprx.80 and 70 m-1, resp. [on SciFinder (R)]


(vaginal or abdominal), and in 81,8 % at 16 weeks gestation. The best route for the ultrasound scan at 13-13+6 weeks in patients with a BMI <25 was the abdominal route, while in patients with a BMI> 25 the vaginal route was the best. The 16 weeks scan was the fastest while the slowest was the vaginal route at 13-13+6 weeks. Conclusions: Fetal cardiac examination at 13-14 weeks may be as successful as screening at 16 weeks in patients with low and high BMI. The transvaginal route provides the best image quality, however it is influenced by the fetal position. The transvaginal route could be an alternative to the abdominal route in patients with a poor acoustic window.


The article features methods of health-saving technology at Chemistry classes in sanatorium type boarding schools. To make the learning process more effective, the teaching staff should maintain its continuity, use visual aids, alternate different types of educational activity, employ methods of fatigue relief, tension and stress reduction, and give lessons in small groups or individually. To raise the level of attention, a chemistry teacher should employ techniques that develop imagination, give brief information on the properties of chemical substances and let the students write down their formulae. To develop conceptual memorization, one should constantly appeal to the origin of scientific terms and their etymology. Chemistry classes should include some elements that would shape knowledge about health and healthy lifestyles in students and attract their attention to environmental problems. The paper introduces a lesson plan "Chemical formulae: Relative Atomic and Molecular Masses") that includes all the elements of this technology. Students get involved in the cognitive process by realizing the importance and usefulness of the information and the significance of chemical substances for human health. The technique makes learning process practically meaningful, expedient and more effective.


Due to their basal position in the vertebrate phylogenetic tree, the study on elasmobranch genetics and cytogenetics can provide remarkable information on the mechanisms underlying the evolution of all vertebrates. In recent years, different molecular approaches have been used to study the relationships between the different taxonomic groups of cartilaginous fish, among them are the physical mapping of specific nucleotide sequences on chromosomes. However, these are controversial, particularly in Torpediniformes in which the species have different karyological parameters. The purpose of this paper is to gather the molecular markers so far present in literature that were used to reconstruct the phylogenetic position of Torpediniformes with respect to the other Batoidea and to discriminate between the various chromosome pairs in the endemic species in the Mediterranean Sea, Torpedo torpedo, T. marmorata and T. nobiliana. The 5S and 18S ribosomal DNA, the HpaI and Alu SINE, the telomeric (TTAGGG)n and the spermatogenesis-related SPATA 16, SPATA 18, and UTY sequences were particularly useful. These last genomic segments were also able to differentiate between the male and the female karyotypes. Moreover, the torpedoes showed a particular genomic organization, especially Torpedo torpedo, in which large quantities of highly repeated DNA and a characteristic distribution of heterochromatin, which is never centromeric, were observed.


Sustainability of their products and practices provides companies with a competitive set of methods and tools to maintain, improve and expand customer and supplier relationships and to ensure access to strategic markets. Companies pay a lot of attention to produce more sustainable products and contribute to the overall sustainability. Most of the companies manage to use lighter materials or change the material with a recyclable one or try to decrease the energy used for manufacturing. However most of these attempts are related to only one part of the life cycle or one aspect of sustainability. In spite the fact that sustainability is thought to be related with the environmental aspects of the product, it is a broad concept and has economic and social dimensions. This makes the evaluation of sustainability a very complex matter. On top of that, to achieve a certain level of sustainability, it is necessary to take into account the whole life cycle of products (life cycle perspective) from material extraction and manufacturing to use and disposal when a decision has to be made about sustainability performance. Life cycle thinking or life cycle perspective takes into account the whole life cycle of the product. The main feature of life cycle thinking is to avoiding problem shifting. This helps not only to take into account all necessary aspects in evaluation of sustainability but also make a more accurate assessment. In order to evaluate the sustainability performance of the products it is necessary to combine a number of life cycle evaluation methodologies; life cycle assessment (LCA) for environmental aspects, life cycle costing (LCC) for economic aspects, and social life cycle assessment for (S-LCA) for social aspects. It is necessary to attain and process a huge amount of data to evaluate these attributes of a product through its life cycle. Product lifecycle management system help to manage product related information through its life cycle. Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management uses PEIDs and enables to gather and distribute life cycle information through the life cycle of a product more precisely. This information may further be used for evaluation of the products sustainability performance. Closed-loop Lifecycle Management contains four main components, PEIDs' to collect data, middleware to combine different applications and collect and distribute life cycle data, a decision support system (DSS) to transform the collected data into usable information and a product knowledge and management system (PDKM) to manage the information and knowledge generated through the life cycle of the product. In automotive industry PLM systems are used to manage the life cycle data but these systems are somehow separate from each other. It is needed to develop a middleware to combine the separate PLM systems, a DSS to transform gathered data into necessary information and knowledge for specific applications and a PDKM to manage the information and knowledge. Holistic life cycle approach takes into account the whole life cycle of the product and generates performance characteristics, which might be configured in order to evaluate the sustainability performance of the product. A Closed-Loop Lifecycle Management system containing a DSS configured with the holistic life cycle approach will be an efficient tool to evaluate and improve the sustainability performance of products.


Purpose – The purpose of the thesis is to improve picking operations that kit materials to assembly lines and based on that, develop a model concerning work balancing in relation to varying demand. To achieve this purpose the following questions of issue are answered:1. What difficulties can exist in picking operations that kit materials to assembly lines? 2. How can difficulties in picking operations that kit materials to assembly lines be resolved?3. How can a model be developed that facilitates improvements concerning work balancing picking operations in relation to varying demand?Method – Through a summary, major difficulties are identified with support of literature studies, interviews, observations and documentation performed at a case company. The collected data form the base of the developed work-balancing model aiming at allowing users to work balance their picking operations.Findings – Initially, a comparison between literature studies, interviews and observations at the case company revealed five major difficulties: lack of parts, order handling, warehouse maintenance, standardization of picking operations and work balancing. When the first three difficulties are improved, a standardization of processes should be performed in order to achieve process perfection. Furthermore, as a last step in the developed four-step-improvement-process, work balancing could lead to improved resource utilization. Moreover, work balancing the picking operation at the case company through the developed model resulted in a reduced balancing loss of 39%.Research limitations – The conducted case study is structured as a holistic single case study. Since companies differ it would be appropriate to conduct multiple case studies in order to generalize results. Furthermore, the authors want to expand the extensive literature studies to identify all difficulties and alternative solutions. Nevertheless, this is not achieved in relation to the scale of the work and time limitations.Further research – If performing a similar investigation other factors need to be taken into consideration regarding gathering of time studies such as lack of parts, picking errors, deficiencies and other interruptions, this in order to acquire a accurate company reflection due to more precise measurements.Key words – Lean production, work balancing, kitting, improvements, standardization, picking operation, varying demand


"Vive la difference" might well be the mating call of the lusty, masculine male, a male, that is, who is not only biologically masculine but whose gender identity is the same. A very few biological males exist, however, whose gender identity is decidedly feminine and who regard "la difference" as an abomination. They see themselves unequivocally as women, a belief which reaches near-delusional proportions-and one which may be reinforced by narrowing the gap between fantasy and reality by the surgical removal of the offending male sexual organs and the substitution of simulated female ones. Such grossly aberrant men are true transsexuals (the condition occurs less often in women) and are to be differentiated from transvestites, who obtain a degree of sexual excitement from cross-dressing, or homosexuals, who know themselves to be men but obtain sexual gratification mainly or exclusively from other men. The three conditions can, however, overlap to some extent. With modern hormonal procedures coupled with advances in the technique of plastic surgery the operation demanded by male transsexuals is now available-sex reassignment surgery. From time to time the names of alleged successes hit the headlines as, for example, those of Christine Jorgensen, Roberta Cowell, Jan Morris, and, a relatively recent addition to the list, that of the six-feet-tall top model Tula. Of particular importance is the case of April Ashley, n'e George Jamieson, not so much because George Jamieson was transformed into what Judge Ormrod had occasion subsequently to term "a convincing feminine pastiche" but because of the autobiographical account1 of her case just published. Marred as it is by a good deal of literary candyfloss and unnecessary revelations of the goings on among the somewhat rancid social creme de la creme with whom she mixed, the book is, nevertheless, an excellent account of male transsexualism and one which should commend itself to anyone interested in this intriguing but sad human condition. April Ashley fulfils almost all the criteria needed to establish a diagnosis of the syndrome. The environmental setting was right. She despised her father, who was a cook in the Royal Navy and not often at home and whom she describes in no uncertain terms as a scoundrel and a boozer. She was, therefore, driven into a dependence on and preference for her mother. Her psychosexual development was right; at the age of 15 she said of herself: "I was taunted for being like a girl and, yes, I wanted to be one." This preoccupation with her gender identity grew: "I was convinced a monstrous mistake had been made and only my being a woman would correct it." After one of several suicide attempts she was admitted to a mental hospital, where heroic attempts were made to alter her determination. She was subjected to ether and thiopentone abreactions and to electric convulsion therapy and given male hormones. It all ended in dismal failure. She told her doctor, "No matter what you do you'll never be able to change my mind." Finally, there was her obsessive determination to have the sex operation. She was asked by Dr Burou, a surgeon in Casablanca who specialises in "the operation," "Are you absolutely sure you want this operation ?" "Yes," she replied, and added "because I'll kill myself if I don't." Was April Ashley's (and other transsexuals') serious, mutilating operation, rendered more hazardous by the danger of serious after-effects, really necessary? The question has been asked by Lothstein2 in a critical review of sex reassignment surgery. His major conclusion is that: "To date the evidence suggests that many patients who would have otherwise undergone sex reassignment surgery may adjust to a non-surgical solution through psychotherapy ... and that surgery should be considered only for a highly select group of diagnosed gender dysphoric patients." There can be no doubt that April Ashley would be included in this group. But the tragedy, says Lothstein, is that the demand for the operation has grown inordinately and that certain hospitals or clinics in the United States make surgery available on a fee-for-service basis. It is from this group of heterogeneous and frequently misdiagnosed patients that the real disasters stem. Virtually the same conclusions were reached in an equally important and complementary paper3 by J R B Ball, whose interest in sexual dysphoria began in Britain and continued after his move to Australia. Though at one time he had grave doubts about the use of surgery in any circumstances, he has, in the light of 30 years' experience, changed his mind. He writes: "In the main the conservative attitude, thorough screening, ruthless exclusion of doubtful cases, and prolonged presurgery observation, led to successful results with excellent individual, social, and sexual adjustment." What is implicit in both these papers is that sexually dysphoric patients have a high incidence of other forms of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, recurrent depression, suicidal attempts, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Clearly these disorders need treatment, including psychotherapy. What shines out like a beacon in all the relevant literature, however, is that transsexualism is a no-man's land whose denizens, with or without sex reassignment surgery, with or without psychotherapy, can, unhappily, never experience biological or emotional fulfilment. HENRY R ROLLIN Librarian, Royal College of Psychiatrists, London SWlX 8PG


N-D-Gluco-N-methylalkanamide detergents have been synthesized. The detergents, which were produced in high yield and at low cost, compared favourably in biochemical studies with commonly used non-ionic detergents, including a chemically related n-alkyl glucoside. The ease of removal by dialysis, high solubilizing power and non-denaturing properties of this new class of detergents make them valuable reagents for membrane research.


ABSTRACT Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a period of racialised and gendered brutality that lasted from 1658 to 1834. Enslaved people were brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from African and Asian territories around the Indian Ocean, and eventually came to constitute the majority of the population of the Colony. Françoise Vergès (2005) asserts that slavery in South Africa generated "processes of disposability" that transformed enslaved people and indigenous Africans, the majority of the population, into "surplus" and expendable objects. The scale of this expendability is difficult to discern today because of the invisibility of slavery in conceptions of the country's history. In this article, I use the lens of "dirt" to render such "processes of disposability" visible. I do so by analysing two texts in which African bodies are portrayed as filthy, menacing and contaminating – the novel Unconfessed and a television advertisement titled "Papa Wag Vir Jou" ("Daddy's Waiting for You") – which I situate within a discussion of South Africa's extraordinarily high rates of incarceration and sexual violence. I point to the seamless continuity in industrial levels of imprisonment employed by the colonial and the modern South African state.


The hydrophobic surfactant protein B (SP-B) is synthesized in alveolar type II cells as a 40-kDa precursor protein that is processed via 39- and 23-kDa intermediates to the mature 8-kDa size. To determine the site of SP-B processing, the subcellular distribution of the precursor and mature forms of SP-B was investigated on ultrathin cryosections of human lung using two polyclonal antibodies that discriminate between precursor forms and the mature form of SP-B. An antibody against the human lysosomal membrane glycoprotein CD63 was used to identify organelles in the endosomal/lysosomal pathway. Precursor SP-B was present in the endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi complex, and multivesicular bodies but was absent from lamellar bodies and plasma membrane. Mature SP-B was present in multivesicular bodies and lamellar bodies but almost completely absent in the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi complex. Semiquantitative evaluation of the immunogold labeling by counting the gold particles representing precursor or mature SP-B in the different compartments showed that the mature-to-precursor ratio was low in the endoplasmic reticulum and the Golgi complex (0.13 and 0.11, respectively), increased in the multivesicular bodies to 3.4, and was very high (65) in lamellar bodies. Multivesicular bodies and lamellar bodies contain the lysosomal membrane marker CD63 and are therefore part of the lysosomal pathway. These data strongly suggest that precursor SP-B is proteolytically processed to its mature 8-kDa form intracellularly in an endosomal/lysosomal compartment, most probably in multivesicular bodies.


For the numerical simulation of the circulatory system, geometrical multiscale models based on the coupling of systems of differential equations with different spatial dimensions are becoming common practice [L. Formaggia et al., Comput. Vis. Sci., 2 (1999), pp. 75-83, A. Quarteroni and A. Veneziani, Multiscale Model. Simul., 1 (2003), pp. 173-195, L. Formaggia et al., Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., 191 (2001), pp. 561-582]. In this paper we address the mathematical analysis of a coupled multiscale system involving a zero-dimensional (0D) model, describing the global characteristics of the circulatory system, and a one-dimensional (1D) model giving the pressure propagation along a straight vessel. We provide a local-in-time existence and uniqueness of classical solutions for this coupled problem. To this purpose we reformulate the original problem in a general abstract framework by splitting it into subproblems (the 0D system of ODEs and the 1D hyperbolic system of PDEs) ; then we use fixed-point techniques. The abstract result is then applied to the original blood flow case under very realistic hypotheses on the data. This work represents the 1D-0D counterpart of the 3D-0D mathematical analysis reported in [A. Quarteroni and A. Veneziani, Multiscale Model. Simul., 1 (2003), pp. 173-195].


Conversions of various pentoses and hexoses into methyl lactate has been demonstrated for the Sn-Beta catalyst. It is found that pentoses are converted to methyl lactate in slightly lower yields (∼40%) than what is obtained for hexoses (∼50%), but higher yields of glycolaldehyde dimethyl acetal are observed for the pentoses. This finding is in accordance to a reaction pathway that involves the retro aldol condensation of the sugars to form a triose and glycolaldehyde for the pentoses, and two trioses for hexoses. When reacting glycolaldehyde (formally a C2-sugar) in the presence of Sn-Beta, aldol condensation occurs, leading to the formation of methyl lactate, methyl vinylglycolate and methyl 2-hydroxy-4-methoxybutanoate. In contrast, when converting the sugars in water at low temperatures (100 °C), Sn-Beta catalyses the isomerisation of sugars (ketose–aldose epimers), rather than the formation of lactates.


The aim of this work is, while using an optimal approach with dynamic programming (DP), to determine the best eco-driving cycle starting from a given driving cycle. To find the cycle with the minimum fuel consumption, two ways of computing an eco-driving cycle are compared. For a Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV), is it more efficient to compute an HEV based eco-driving cycle or to compute a conventional vehicle based eco-driving cycle and then to adapt it to a hybrid vehicle? Hence, two different DP programs are developed, that lead to two different eco-driving cycles: hybrid and conventional. Finally, the fuel consumption of an HEV with two Energy Management Strategies (EMS) will be compared: an off-line optimal one based on the Pontryagin Minimum Principle and an on-line suboptimal Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS). The paper shows that in order to generate the best speed trajectory in terms of fuel consumption, it is necessary to take the fact that the vehicle is an HEV into account.


Contact tracing is being widely employed to combat the spread of COVID-19. Many apps have been developed that allow for tracing to be done automatically based off location and interaction data generated by users. There are concerns, however, regarding the privacy and security of users data when using these apps. These concerns are paramount for users who contract the virus, as they are generally required to release all their data. Motivated by the need to protect users privacy we propose two solutions to this problem. Our first solution builds on current "message based" methods and our second leverages ideas from secret sharing and additively homomorphic encryption.


Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Over the past two decades, we have seen a rapid technological evolution of object detection and its profound impact on the entire computer vision field. If we consider today's object detection technique as a revolution driven by deep learning, then, back in the 1990s, we would see the ingenious thinking and long-term perspective design of early computer vision. This article extensively reviews this fast-moving research field in the light of technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2022). A number of topics have been covered in this article, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speedup techniques, and recent state-of-the-art detection methods.


Novel ZnO microbowls are successfully synthesized by the thermal evaporating of a mixture of ZnS powder and Zn powder. The morphologies of the as-synthesized products can be adjusted by changing the temperature and the type of substrate. The morphologies, microstructures, and photoluminescence properties are investigated by X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscope, and photoluminescence spectroscopy respectively. The growth mechanism of the as-synthesized ZnO microbowls is proposed based on the experimental results. ZnO microbowls presented here can be used as building blocks to fabricate optical and optoelectronic micro/nano devices.


Boys are being out-performed academically by girls in school. One possible explanation is that boys' higher activity levels may cause them to spend the early grades learning how to control their behavior rather than focusing on academics. It is possible that teachers may be more punitive toward active boys in particular, and if boys are disciplined more, perhaps they are more likely to see school as a punitive place. This may make it more difficult for boys to develop competence in school. This short-term, longitudinal study examined gender differences in activity level and teacher-reported relationship quality with more active kindergarten students. In addition, data were gathered on the amount of correction received by all students, but particularly by boys who exhibited higher activity levels. Ethnicity of teachers and students was also examined, and qualitative case studies of the most active children were developed. Participants were 29 kindergarteners in four classrooms in an urban, low-income, ethnically diverse elementary school near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Data were collected via classroom observations, teacher report measures, grades and discipline records, and through open-ended interviews with teachers and consultants. Study results indicate that, on average, boys were significantly more active than girls in this sample. Boys received more correction from teachers than did girls. No difference was uncovered in teacher affect expressed toward boys as compared to girls, and teacher affect did not appear to differ between African American and Caucasian children. Highly active children were disciplined more harshly than less active children. Case studies indicated that protective factors may operate for some active children, preventing high-conflict teacher-child relationships. Implications for further research and for teacher training are discussed.


This paper describes the design, modeling, and simulation of a prototype wire-free walking scratch-drive microrobot with the dimensions of 365 mum x 78 mum . The microrobot consists of three scratch-drive actuators and two steering arms. The motion is controlled by delivering power via a capacitive coupling, with an underlying electric grid, to the microrobot. This way, the microrobot can move freely without connected wire for power supply. A globally controllable system is provided by a finite-state machine. The behavior of this microrobot using novel accurate analytical methods and the finite-element method simulation has been investigated. An automatic release mechanism is provided for mass production.


The aim of our study was to research of the current state of goat milk production in Ukraine and the world and outlined the main factors, including genetic, that determine its quality and, accordingly, the quality of cheese. It has been established that the general global trends in the development of goat breeding indicate the growing role of this field in the nutrition of the population. Thus, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), there is a steady increase in both the number and gross goat milk production. According to the research conducted from 2015 to 2019, the number of dairy goats in the world increased by 6.8 % – to more than 215 million heads. The stable growth of them took place in Europe (+ 30.0 %) and Africa (+ 10.3%). The largest number of dairy goats was kept in 2019 in Asia (50.8 %) and Africa (40.0 %). Gross production of goat milk in the world by 4.9 % from 2015 to 2019 increased. In Ukraine, the situation in dairy goat breeding is still significantly different from global trends – during the period under study, the number of goats decreased by 6.8 %, gross milk production decreased by 14.5 %. The analytical material has been presented as to the dependence of the chemical composition of goat milk on genotypic and paratypic factors, such as: breed, age, yean season, lactation stages, duration of dry period and pregnancy, feeding, housing conditions, influence of the environment (temperature, humidity), body weight and etc. It has been noted that European breeds of dairy goats tend to have much greater potential for milk production than the local breeds that have not undergone selection changes. At the same time, many indigenous breeds of goats have higher dry matter content in milk and are better adapted to local housing and feeding conditions, especially under climate change. The global demand on goat milk products is predicted to increase as consumers become more demanding as to the quality of animal products, which are important in the daily diet owing to the optimal content of macro- and micronutrients.


The typical means by which an attacker breaks into a network is through a chain of exploits, where each exploit in the chain lays the groundwork for subsequent exploits. Such a chain is called an attack path, and the set of all possible attack paths form an attack graph. Researchers have proposed a variety of methods to generate attack graphs. In this paper, we provide a novel alternative approach to network vulnerability analysis by utilizing a penetration tester's perspective of maximal level of penetration possible on a host. Our approach has the following benefits: it provides a more intuitive model in which an analyst can work, and its algorithmic complexity is polynomial in the size of the network, and so has the potential of scaling well to practical networks. The drawback is that we track only "good" attack paths, as opposed to all possible attack paths. Hence, an analyst may make suboptimal choices when repairing the network. Since attack graphs grow exponentially with the size of the network, we argue that suboptimal solutions are an unavoidable cost of scalability, and hence practical utility. A working prototype tool has been implemented to demonstrate the practicality of our approach


Many efforts have been taken to train spiking neural networks (SNNs), but most of them still need improvements due to the discontinuous and non-differential characteristics of SNNs. While the mammalian brains solve these kinds of problems by integrating a series of biological plasticity learning rules. In this paper, we will focus on two biological plausible methodologies and try to solve these catastrophic training problems in SNNs. Firstly, the biological neural network will try to keep a balance between inputs and outputs on both the neuron and the network levels. Secondly, the biological synaptic weights will be passively updated by the changes of the membrane potentials of the neighbour-hood neurons, and the plasticity of synapses will not propagate back to other previous layers. With these biological inspirations, we propose Voltage-driven Plasticity-centric SNN (VPSNN), which includes four steps, namely: feed forward inference, unsupervised equilibrium state learning, supervised last layer learning and passively updating synaptic weights based on spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP). Finally we get the accuracy of 98.52% on the hand-written digits classification task on MNIST. In addition, with the help of a visualization tool, we try to analyze the black box of SNN and get better understanding of what benefits have been acquired by the proposed method.


The authors characterize multiple-access for cellular mobile radio networks, in which users are assumed to be Poisson-distributed in the plane. These networks use frequency-hopped or hybrid direct-sequence/slow frequency-hopped spread-spectrum signaling. The Gaussian approximation technique is used to compute the symbol error probability for both types of spread-spectrum signaling with noncoherent MFSK modulation, and for a general class of dispersive fading channels. Numerical evaluations of an example of a doubly dispersive fading channel are presented.<<ETX>>


Thermoelectric materials can directly convert thermal energy into electrical energy. Research and development of thermoelectric generators have been actively carried out to use waste heat. Electrodes are necessary to take out the electrical power from the thermoelectric couples. However, large portion of the generated electrical power is often lost at the interface between electrode and thermoelectric materials. Though oxide materials are promising for a thermoelectric generator at a high temperature, they are not practically used as the joining technique is not established. Not only low contact resistance but also sufficient mechanical strength is required for the joining. In this report, tin alloy solder was attempted for cold side junction to obtain low contact resistance and high mechanical strength at the interface. Wettability of the solder to Ca3Co2O6 and the thermoelectric generating properties were improved by adding titanium to tin alloy.


ABSTRACT Research on recommendation agents (RAs) originally focused on interactive RAs, which rely on explicit methods, i.e., eliciting user-provided inputs to learn about consumers' needs and preferences. Recently, due to the availability of large amounts of data about individuals, the focus shifted toward non-interactive RAs that use implicit methods rather than explicit ones to understand users' needs. This paper examined the differences between interactive and non-interactive RA types in terms of how they influence the impacts of two important antecedents of RA adoption, namely recommendation quality and trust on users' cognitive and affective attitudes and behavioral intention. To that end, we developed a set of hypotheses and tested them empirically using a meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach. Our findings provide strong support for the influence of interactivity on RA users' attitudes and cognitions. While we found that recommendation quality exerts a strong influence on consumers' cognitive attitudes toward interactive RAs, this influence is statistically non-significant in the context of non-interactive RAs, in which recommendation quality mainly drives consumers' affective attitudes toward the agent. Furthermore, while we found that cognitive attitudes exert a stronger influence than affective ones on consumers' adoption of non-interactive RAs, our results indicate that the reverse is true with interactive RAs. Given the recent rise in the popularity of non-interactive RA tools, our results carry important implications for researchers and practitioners. Specifically, this study contributes to the extensive literature on consumers' use of RAs by providing a better understanding of the differences between interactive and non-interactive RAs. For practitioners, the findings provide guidance for designers and providers of RAs on developing and improving RAs that are more likely to be adopted by consumers.


Leaves of tropical multipurpose tree species (5 N-fixing, 5 non-N-fixing and combinations of 5 N-fixing species with a non-N-fixing) were incorporated in soil to evaluate effects on soil microbial biomass and N-availability of wheat in a pot experiment under dryland conditions. Soil microbial biomass and N-availability are closely linked to the productivity of an ecosystem. High quality leaves of N-fixing tree species had higher N content, and lower polyphenol (PPL) and lignin (LIG) contents (resulting in lower LIG/N, PPL/N and LIG + PPL/N ratios) than low quality leaves of non-N-fixing species. Combination treatments showed intermediate values of different parameters. Application of high quality leaves caused maximum rise in microbial biomass C and N and available-N in soil; the increase was minimum with low quality leaves and intermediate with combined treatment. Among Nfixing species, Dalbergia sissoo, Cassia fistula and Prosopis cineraria leaf applications showed greater increase in microbial biomass C (128-147% over control) and N (174 - 228%). Strong correlations between LIG + PPL/N ratio of leaves with MBC and MBN of wheat suggests that the ratio can be used to screen multipurpose tree species for use as soil amendment.


Abstract Private law theory must confront the plurality of values that inform the problems that private law addresses in practice. We consider Hanoch Dagan's and Michael Heller's The Choice Theory of Contracts as a case-study in the promise and perils that embracing plural values poses for private law theory. We begin by arguing that private law theory cannot ignore value pluralism and identify three approaches that theory might take to pluralism. We call these approaches capitulating to, leveraging, and embracing value pluralism. We illustrate each approach and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Theories that capitulate to pluralism simultaneously limit their scope and hamper their persuasiveness even within their restricted domains. Theories that leverage pluralism limit their domains more dramatically still. And theories that embrace pluralism are difficult to operationalize in practice without abandoning their pluralist roots. We briefly illustrate the drawbacks of capitulating to and leveraging pluralism with examples from recent contract theory. We then take up theories that embrace pluralism in greater detail, by studying Dagan and Heller's approach. We argue that Dagan and Heller do not solve the deep problems that operationalizing their embrace of pluralism inevitably engenders.


The Escherichia coli chaperonins GroEL and GroES facilitate protein folding in an adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-dependent manner. After a single cycle of ATP hydrolysis by the adenosine triphosphatase (ATPase) activity of GroEL, the bi-toroidal GroEL formed a stable asymmetric ternary complex with GroES and nucleotide (bulletlike structures). With each subsequent turnover, ATP was hydrolyzed by one ring of GroEL in a quantized manner, completely releasing the adenosine diphosphate and GroES that were tightly bound to the other ring as a result of the previous turnover. The catalytic cycle involved formation of a symmetric complex (football-like structures) as an intermediate that accumulated before the rate-determining hydrolytic step. After one to two cycles, most of the substrate protein dissociated still in a nonnative state, which is consistent with intermolecular transfer of the substrate protein between toroids of high and low affinity. A unifying model for chaperonin-facilitated protein folding based on successive rounds of binding and release, and partitioning between committed and kinetically trapped intermediates, is proposed.


In this talk, we introduce a robot conversation system. Generally speaking, the conversation is not performed only through the exchange of speech information. It needs the exchange of visual information: facial expressions, body poses, and gestures convey rich information to achieve natural conversation. In this context, the body and the vision system of the robot, can be regard as the essential components for the conversational communication system. Here, we first emphasize the importance of visual information processing especially in sending/receiving the nuance of utterances and expressing/recognizing the role structure of participants. Then, we describe the implementation of these visual functions. We also mention about the cooperative use of the visual information along with the audio information. Finally, we show you the conversation robot SCHEMA which achieves natural conversation through the auditory-visual information processing. AVSP 2010 -International Conference


This paper presents a new block matching motion estimation algorithm and its VLSI architecture design. The proposed global elimination algorithm (GEA) was derived from successive elimination algorithm (SEA), which can skip unnecessary sum of absolute difference (SAD) calculation by comparing minimum SAD with subsampled SAD (SSAD). Our basic idea is to separate the decision of early termination and SAD calculation for each candidate block to make data flow more regular and suitable for hardware. In short, we first compare the rough characteristics of all candidate blocks with the current block (SSAD). In turn, we select several best roughly matched candidate blocks to re-compare them with the current block by using detailed characteristics (SAD). Other features of GEA include fixed processing cycles, no initial guess, and high video quality (almost the same as full search). Unlike other fast algorithms, the mapping of GEA to hardware is very simple. We proposed an architecture that is composed of a systolic part to efficiently compute SSAD, an adder tree to support both SSAD and SAD calculations, and a comparator tree to avoid expensive sorting circuits. Simulation results show that our design is much more area efficient than many full-search architectures while maintaining high video quality and processing capability.


Multi-Factor Authentication is intended to strengthen the security of password-based authentication by adding another factor, such as hardware tokens or one-time passwords using mobile apps. However, this increased authentication security comes with potential drawbacks that can lead to account and asset loss. If users lose access to their additional authentication factors for any reason, they will be locked out of their accounts. Consequently, services that provide Multi-Factor Authentication should deploy procedures to allow their users to recover from losing access to their additional factor that are both secure and easy-to-use. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to first-hand investigate the security and user experience of deployed Multi-Factor Authentication recovery procedures. We first evaluate the official help and support pages of 1,303 websites that provide Multi-Factor Authentication and collect documented information about their recovery procedures. Second, we select a subset of 71 websites, create accounts, set up Multi-Factor Authentication, and perform an in-depth investigation of their recovery procedure security and user experience. We find that many websites deploy insecure Multi-Factor Au-thentication recovery procedures and allowed us to circumvent and disable Multi-Factor Authentication when having access to the accounts' associated email addresses. Furthermore, we commonly observed discrepancies between our in-depth analysis and the official help and support pages, implying that information meant to aid users is often either incorrect or outdated. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations for best practices regarding Multi-Factor Authentication recovery.